While drilling, milling, shaping, cutting, burnishing, smoothing, or carrying out other such processes on parts and components of machines, devices, and other manufactured objects, it is generally desirable, regardless of the shape of the part or component undergoing the process, to firmly support and constrain motion of the part or component. For example, machinists employ a wide variety of work-piece holders that feature adjustable surfaces and clamping components in order to rigidly mount work pieces during drilling, shaping, and milling operations. As another example, various machine tools, including lathes, feature chambers and clamping components to constrain motions of a work piece that is precisely rotated about a horizontal axis and/or translated along the horizontal axis during a lathe operation. Similarly, even very large parts and components, such as aircraft wings, aircraft fuselages, wind-turbine blades, and many other large manufactured items need to be supported and held in place while undergoing various different manufacturing operations.
In order to support parts, components, and other objects during manufacturing and repair operations, it was common, in the past, for manufacturers to design and produce a variety of different, component-specific large-scale jigs, or work-piece holders, on which large-scale parts and components could be supported and immobilized during manufacture. However, the cost of producing, employing, maintaining, and storing such large-scale work-piece holders can be prohibitive, particularly when the volume of production of the large-scale manufactured parts is modest. More recently, complex, very large-scale machine tools have been developed to serve as adjustable mounting systems, or jigs, for very large work pieces. These adjustable mounting systems are generally computer controlled and feature large numbers of complex, hydraulically controlled support members that can be positioned according to computationally encoded work-piece surfaces. While cost effective in comparison to designing, implementing, maintaining, and storing special-purpose mounts and jigs, these large-scale adjustable machine-tool mounting systems are nonetheless expensive, include many failure-prone components, use significant amounts of energy to maintain the positions of the support members with respect to the surfaces of the work pieces, are difficult to relocate, once constructed, and may be susceptible to damage from the manufacturing processes undertaken on work pieces supported by the adjustable machine-tool mounting systems. Designers, manufacturers, and users of adjustable machine-tool mounting systems continue to seek improvements in the adjustable machine-tool mounting systems to facilitate manufacturing processes and expand the applicability of automated, adjustable machine-tool mounting systems within industry.